‘I Didn’t Want to Make What Looked Like Art’: Watch Cindy Sherman Transform Herself Into Female Fantasies, Stereotypes, and Nightmares

Standing in a room full of Cindy
Sherman‘s photographs is disconcerting—there might be a
portrait of a Hollywood glam starlet, a stately matriarch staring
straight down the camera lens, and a woman with disheveled hair and
bloodshot eyes next to one another. All of these women are figments
of Sherman’s imagination brought to life in cinematic
self-portraits.

Right now, the largest exhibition of Sherman’s work to date is
on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery in an acclaimed
mid-career retrospective (through September 15). Beyond the
generally recognizable characters Sherman inhabits, there are also
gross distortions of the human form—including a whole series of
clowns and a group of Instagram-filtered images that look like
they’ve been projected from a fun-house mirror. Back in
2009, as part of an episode for the “Art in the
Twenty-First Century” television series, Sherman explained how she
began documenting these transformative self-portraits.

“I wanted it [the pictures] to look like, you know, anybody
would understand it,” she tells Art21. “I didn’t want to make what looked like
art.” Instead, Sherman wanted to make photographs that alluded to
films and other cultural history we don’t even realize we have
absorbed—images that might remind a viewer of a scene from a
popular movie, or an actress who starred in one. She’s also not
precious about art history, which is just one of many sources of
inspiration. She tells Art21, “It’s just another thing that can
influence me, along with television and cheap magazines.”

Watch the full segment, which originally appeared as part of
the “Art in the Twenty-First Century” television
series on PBS, below. “Cindy Sherman” is on view at the National Portrait
Gallery in London through September 15, 2019. 

 This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a
collaboration between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips
of newsmaking artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21’s
flagship Art in the Twenty-First
Century television is available now on PBS. Watch full
episodes and learn about the organization’s education programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘I Didn’t Want to Make What Looked Like Art’: Watch
Cindy Sherman Transform Herself Into Female Fantasies, Stereotypes,
and Nightmares appeared first on artnet News.